TOTALLY GEODESIC SURFACES IN TWIST KNOT COMPLEMENTS

We give explicit examples of infinitely many noncommensurable (nonarithmetic) hyperbolic 3-manifolds admitting exactly k totally geodesic surfaces for any positive integer k, answering a question of Bader, Fisher, Miller, and Stover. The construction comes from a family of twist knot complements and their dihedral covers. The case k = 1 arises from the uniqueness of an immersed totally geodesic thrice-punctured sphere, answering a question of Reid. Applying the proof techniques of the main result, we explicitly construct nonelementary maximal Fuchsian subgroups of infinite covolume within twist knot groups, and we also show that no twist knot complement with odd prime half twists is right-angled in the sense of Champanerkar, Kofman, and Purcell.